Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
3 Automated Sound Panel Modification for Audio Lab
Rajat Vora
Rishi Dutt Kalluri
Zach Bryl
Shaoyu Meng design_document1.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
# Problem
The Illinois Augmented Listening Laboratory is currently planning on building a fully automated audio lab. This lab could autonomously reorganize the lab space (speakers, mics, etc.) and modify the room acoustics to run different experiments, via a remotely submitted configuration. The acoustics of the room are controlled by sound panels, which absorb sound and are set to bounce sound around the room in different ways. Currently, there isn’t a way to adjust these panels autonomously. While mics and speakers can move around on pulleys, sound paneling is wall mounted and isn’t possible to adjust in the same way.

Note: Acoustic sound panels are wall mounted panels, typically made of soft foam or composite material. The panels typically have triangular pyramids, pointing in the direction of incoming sound. The panels work by receiving incoming sound, and trapping the sound between these pyramids. The sounds bounces around between the pyramids until it dissipates, and never gets reflected back into the room.

# Solution Overview
Our solution for modifying these acoustic panels is to allow each sound panel to be independently enabled/disabled. We plan to control this with a shutter over each panel, where every panel’s shutter can be modified through a single interface. Controlling the panels is equivalent to allowing sound to come in contact with them. If the shutter is closed, sound wont reach the panels and will bounce off, like a wall. However, when open, sound can reach the panel and will be absorbed.

# Solution Components

## Shutter Subsystem
-Can be quickly opened or closed depending on interface control
-No sound is allowed to reach the panel when closed
-Should not reflect any sound waves back when opened
-Should close flat to mimic a wall
-Can be motorized or pneumatic

## Interface Subsystem
-Connects to all the panel shutters
-Allows for submission of a configuration file to configure all the panel shutters in parallel
-Able to connect to the internet for remotely submitted configurations

# Criterion for success
Our solution will be successful if it significantly changes the acoustics of the room, as measured by e.g. the T60 reverberation time or C50 direct-to-reverberant ratio, and is remotely controllable with little or no human intervention. The interface should be able to accept locally or remotely submitted configurations.

Dynamic Legged Robot

Joseph Byrnes, Kanyon Edvall, Ahsan Qureshi

Featured Project

We plan to create a dynamic robot with one to two legs stabilized in one or two dimensions in order to demonstrate jumping and forward/backward walking. This project will demonstrate the feasibility of inexpensive walking robots and provide the starting point for a novel quadrupedal robot. We will write a hybrid position-force task space controller for each leg. We will use a modified version of the ODrive open source motor controller to control the torque of the joints. The joints will be driven with high torque off-the-shelf brushless DC motors. We will use high precision magnetic encoders such as the AS5048A to read the angles of each joint. The inverse dynamics calculations and system controller will run on a TI F28335 processor.

We feel that this project appropriately brings together knowledge from our previous coursework as well as our extracurricular, research, and professional experiences. It allows each one of us to apply our strengths to an exciting and novel project. We plan to use the legs, software, and simulation that we develop in this class to create a fully functional quadruped in the future and release our work so that others can build off of our project. This project will be very time intensive but we are very passionate about this project and confident that we are up for the challenge.

While dynamically stable quadrupeds exist— Boston Dynamics’ Spot mini, Unitree’s Laikago, Ghost Robotics’ Vision, etc— all of these robots use custom motors and/or proprietary control algorithms which are not conducive to the increase of legged robotics development. With a well documented affordable quadruped platform we believe more engineers will be motivated and able to contribute to development of legged robotics.

More specifics detailed here:

https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=30338

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